This Is How The Hot Weather Is Impacting Employee Attendance

Pulling a sickie to work on that tan or head to the beach? Apparently not. Official data sourced by ELAS from one of the countries most highly regarded absence management systems, Attendance Pro, has highlighted that absences haven’t spiked during the hot weather in July.

The data shows that out of the top 5 most common days to have off ill this month, four of them were Mondays (1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd) whilst the fifth most common was Wednesday 24th, when the temperature reached a mammoth 30 degrees. It’s commonplace throughout the year for Monday to be the most popular day for absences.

This data supports our findings from earlier in the year, where we announced that the absence rates on Mondays are nearly double the absence rates on Fridays (24.8% versus 12.8%). There are lots of reasons why employees might be absent from work. Some of them will be genuine, and some of them might stretch the term ‘believable.’ Even with the rise of presenteeism (coming into work, even if you’re too sick to be there and should be at home) our absence advisers and legal team have still been treated to a wide range of ‘sickie’ excuses, that sometimes sound too unusual to be true!

Enrique Garcia is an employment law consultant for ELAS. He says: “ELAS has been at the forefront of absence management for the last decade. To help employers tackle the growing trend for sickies, we developed Attendance Pro, the first absence management software to identify and track absences, allowing employers to see where problems might lie.

There is a developing trend showing for increased absence rates on Mondays, with 9 out of the top 10 days for absence in 2019 so far, being on a Monday.  Our absence management specialists first picked up on this shift in 2016 and this continued into 2018.  The 2019 statistics have again highlighted it.”

“Employers should ensure that they have robust return to work procedures in place, part of which should be discussing in detail the reason for absence. Should a health issue be suggested, the employer could follow up by seeking to obtain a medical report; this will reveal whether or not the employee is properly addressing any underlying medical condition”